On Fri Apr 18 04:11:34 2008, Andre-John Mas wrote:

On 17-Apr-08, at 02:15 , Johansson Olle E wrote:
It's not always that simple, there's a lot of gateway issues we need to take care of too. If I have a jabber server on IPv4 only, and your XMPP SRV records has IPv6 only, I need a configuration for redirecting the jabber messages to an IPv4 to IPv6 gateway. There are application level issues to handle migration here, not only socket and DNS issues.

Is there any real world experience in this context?

Within SMTP, yes - the networking of SMTP is very similar to XMPP.

But I think we can probably assume that by the time there are IPv6-only servers, IPv6 will be commonplace. Most assumptions are that servers will remain dual-stack for a considerable time - clients are far more likely to end up IPv6-only.

The obvious solution for a server wishing to add IPv6 is tunnelling, though, and given it's really quite easy, I don't think IPv6-only clients will prove a problem. I'll flag Tony Finch on this, because I know he's had some experience in the SMTP world of IPv6 deployment.

The more interesting problem (which Tony Finch pointed out a while back) is that on a SRV lookup, you get the A/AAAA records "for free" in the additional section. But if you only get one or other, you can't assume that the other doesn't exist. So if you get only A, that doesn't mean that there's no IPv6 address.

The reason is that if records in the Additional section of the response are left out, there's no indication in the DNS response packet - the DNS response packet will only indicate if it couldn't fit all the SRV records in.

So in effect - and because you can miss out on only *some* of the A or AAAA records, you need to do potentially three queries for every SRV record instead of one. Technically, this isn't a new problem, but it's certainly an annoying byproduct of IPv6 increasing the DNS packet size.

Dave.
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